Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Cathy Young: Thank you for having me.
Young: No, I’m quite sure they didn’t expect that. And I’ll tell you, I spoke before the election to conservative pundits who didn’t like a lot of the populist stuff. They didn’t like Biden. They didn’t like the higher corporate taxes and so on. And they were assuring me that No, no, no, the tariffs are not going to happen. All of this is just to repeal to the populist base, and it’s really just talk. So I think we’re at the “find out” stage of this.
Young: Some of them are, yeah.
Young: Right. First of all, let me point out that Trump’s recent posts really reflect his essential mindset that we’re always being victimized, like we’re always the sucker for everybody else and everybody is beating up on us. It’s funny because conservatives have been trashing, in some cases rightly, the victim mentality on the left, and here is this quintessential victim mentality like we’re always getting taken advantage of. It’s a totally zero-sum view of trade, which is ridiculous. The coercion angle is also interesting because in terms of this much discussed subject of the similarities between Trump and Putin, which sometimes I think are exaggerated, it’s very common in Putin’s inner circle to talk about how Ukraine is in a real state and Ukraine wouldn’t really exist without support from the West. Here we have Trump using similar language about Canada. There is a certain... I’m not saying that he’s proposing to drive tanks into Canada, but the mindset is interesting in a very bad way.
Young: What’s fascinating about and disturbing about this latest trade war, if you want to call it that, [is that] he doesn’t really seem to have any specific demands for what Canada can do. He’s made these nebulous statements about all of this fentanyl, all of these drugs that are supposedly coming in from Canada. And I’ve seen people who are trying to justify this and say, Yeah, there’s a lot of unregulated trucking that may be bringing drugs into the U.S.
Sargent: Yes, the lack of any actual rationale combined with him saying things like, Well, if you want to avoid tariffs, become our fifty-first state, reminds me of the schoolyard bully says something like, What did you say about my mother? Unfortunately, here he’s the president of the United States talking about our relationships with other countries.
Sargent: Right. In all seriousness, the combination of the lack of a rationale with the explicit statement that if you want to avoid tariffs, submit to us seems alarming.
And it’s interesting, and I’m maybe going off on a little tangent here, that we had this bizarre statement a couple of days ago from JD Vance about how the leader of every country is supposed to look out for his country and this is what America First is all about. American interests should be primary, which in a certain sense no one would really dispute. Of course, if you’re the president of the U.S., the U.S. is the country that you’re supposed to be concerned about first and foremost. Thank you, Captain Obvious, right? But he then went on to say—he was being interviewed by Sean Hannity, who asked him something about Putin and Xi—Yeah, well, President Xi looks out for his country, for his people. Vladimir Putin looks out for his people, and Donald Trump looks out for Americans.
Sargent: To your point, we really are getting a very clear look at what America First actually means. It is almost like a Putinesque attitude where looking out for your country, as JD Vance put it, means you don’t have any obligations to the international order of any kind. Now we have business leaders and business groups being really quiet about the impact all this could have.
Young: Well, we’ll see. It’s certainly a factor. We saw that Zuckerberg just agreed to a $25 million settlement to Trump in a lawsuit over Trump being banned from Facebook after the January 6 events. It’s certainly a sign that the intimidation works, certainly when you have bullying by litigation. The chilling of speech by litigation is certainly a thing that’s been going on for some time, and when you combine that with the power of the presidency, it really does become doubly concerning, to say the least.
Sargent: Yes. You’re right to underscore the Wall Street Journal’s reaction to the tariffs as being an important thing. Trump himself erupted about precisely that in one of his tweets, saying that The Wall Street Journal is “globalist.”
Sargent: Of course he did. He absolutely did. To talk about Republicans as well, because the degree to which they are intimidated is a little bit missing from the discussion, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently reported that many Republican lawmakers she talks to are “beside themselves with anxiety” about where everything is going. I’ve got think that corporate leaders are going to be on the phone with GOP senators privately saying, You’ve got do something about this. Even if those corporate leaders won’t say anything publicly, they’re going to want Republican senators and lawmakers to step up a little bit here. You guys at The Bulwark closely track the GOP’s capitulation to Trump, where do you see this element of it going?
I was rereading just yesterday that piece that I did about the prospective Trump cabinet. This was, I think, back in September. I mentioned Kash Patel and I said, Well, it’s probably very unlikely that he could actually get confirmed as director of the FBI or CIA, and Well, maybe he’ll get one of these acting director things. Right now, it looks like he is going to be confirmed. The capitulation has been far more complete and far more disgraceful than I expected. I guess we’ll see what will happen with Tulsi Gabbard because that may be another line in the sand.
Sargent: That’s a really good question. With Trump openly and explicitly saying there is very likely to be “pain,” you’re going to also see major GOP constituencies who potentially take a big hit here, like farmers, for instance. Where do you see that going? The last time around, in the first administration, Trump essentially bought out farmers with aid programs after they started to take a hit from the tariffs. This looks like it could get a lot worse, right?
And I guess we’ll see because we do get a lot of food from Canada and Mexico. I just looked at the strawberries I got delivered from Wegmans yesterday and they’re from Mexico. So we’ll see how that goes because I think a lot of people really do not realize what’s about to happen. As I said, we’re at the find out stage.
Young: Can I say the other F-word? Yeah, well there’s the “fuck around and find out” line, FAFO. I guess now this is the find out part. And of course, the unfortunate thing is that those of us who didn’t fuck around are also about to find out what happens when our fellow citizens fuck around. Such is life.
Young: Thank you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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